Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Uses of Caricature

One of the most useful new concepts in IHW:SC and SC3 is Cultural Traits. Each world has its own culture, and each culture has traits. The culture from Rienhart's World might be Aggressive 2, Subtle 3, Arrogant 1, and Impatient 1. This group of traits, then, represents a caricature of a person from Rienhart's World. Individuals, of course, may vary widely from this caricature. They may in fact exhibit none of these traits, but on a bell curve, these traits stand out as most representative of this culture.

This gives the Player and GM both a baseline to construct a character, NPC or PC. Rather than working cold, one can take the baseline as the default, then decide if and how the individual deviates from it. It not only helps constructing the character's personality, but also gives an indication of how that character fits into that culture. Someone with slight variations should have little problems, but someone with large differences, especially oppositional differences, might be very out of place.

4 comments:

When coming up with different cultures, having a base sketch, such as you've outlined, is very helpful - both for consistancy (for GM's NPCs and Players' PCs) within the culture and to highlight the points of difference between cultures. And, of course, the inhabitants of a planet are unlikely to have a monolithic culture (even with modern communications and transportation, there will be regional variances) so there is room for variance from the caricature.

I think either MegaTraveller or T4 started in this direction, but I don't know how far they got with it. I am very interested to see where your examination of this goes :)

Cool, Kobold! My knowledge of Traveller is limited to Classic Traveller - I bought the LBBs in 1977, the year they came out, the first RPG I ever bought - but it wouldn't surprise me. Traveller was one of the most innovative games ever written, along with the original D&D and Ars Magica, and I could see Marc Miller thinking along these lines. It would be similar to how he codified planets with his numbering system.

You are exactly correct about sub-cultures within the larger culture. They would differ, just as a Central European would differ from an American or a Chinese person. Not to the same extent, though - these cultures have only had a couple thousand years max - 1200+ on the slowboats from Earth, and 500+ since they got to the Cluster - to change. The fact that most Slowboats practiced a rigid Cultural Emulation to unite the crews/passengers would also inhibit *too* much variation.

Still, there would be some, especially in the last 500 years, and all the non-native cultures of the Americas are barely 500 years old at the most. :D

I'm always amused by the way people think "common sample" ideas mean monoculture. Its the same truth of fantasy games, I run the personalities of everyone has fits my vision for the game. They rarely map directly to a specific pattern, but may share a few traits. I think it is always wise to remember that a common example, doesn't mean identical across the board.

Exactly, Tim! Assuming everyone from a culture will fit the Cultural Traits exactly would be a mis-use of caricature, the same as it would in real life if one suppoed all the people of a certain culture would be the same. Common culture informs, it doesn't dictate.